75

A Party:

525 Perugia Way

Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

27 August 1965

The party arrangements have been lengthy and fraught; almost closer, in their withdrawals, stand-offs and concessions, to negotiations for a peace settlement.

Which is, in a way, what it is. The brash young Beatles are in the ascendant. Elvis Presley was once the talk of America, but now it is all Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. They have stolen his thunder. Until the spring, Elvis’s career was in the doldrums, with no top 10 single since 1963. His movie career, too, is adrift: his last, Tickle Me, set in a beauty parlour, was barely noticed. But the Beatles can do no wrong. They have just premiered Help!, which seems set to repeat the success of A Hard Day’s Night. Three days ago, Hollywood’s crème de la crème – Rock Hudson, Jack Benny, Jane Fonda, Groucho Marx, James Stewart – attended a party in their honour, and even queued for autographs.

The Estate of David Gahr/Getty Images

At the beginning of the month, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, invites Brian Epstein to his New York office to hammer out a deal. They sit on chairs made from elephants’ feet and finalise arrangements over pastrami sandwiches and root beer. The colonel calls the shots. The Beatles will come to Elvis, not the other way round; no cameras or tape-recorders will be permitted; and no publicity of any sort. In turn, Epstein insists that there must be extra security on the gates.

John makes his own demands, saying he doesn’t even want the colonel or Epstein to be at the meeting: ‘If both sides start lining up teams of supporters it will turn into a contest to see who can field the most players.’ But over another business lunch, beside the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Parker insists he will attend, so Epstein demands parity. Before long, the numbers have increased: as Elvis invites more of his self-styled ‘Memphis Mafia’, the Beatles invite their roadies Neil and Mal, their press officer Tony Barrow, and their driver Alf Bicknell, as well as Chris Hutchins from the NME, who helped Epstein gain an entrée with the colonel.

When the big day comes, there are nerves on both sides. ‘Before the Beatles arrived that night, Elvis and I were in his bathroom doing his hair,’ recalls one member of his entourage, Larry Geller. ‘Elvis was unusually quiet, even pensive, as he drummed his fingers on the marble ledge.’ In their limousine on the way there, Barrow notices the Beatles growing tense. They are, after all, about to meet the man who has long been their idol. ‘Do you think the colonel has bothered to tell Elvis we’re coming?’ asks John.

The Beatles and their entourage are led into a vast circular room, lit in red and blue. In a red shirt with bolero sleeves, Elvis stands in the centre of a ring of twenty people. His wife Priscilla stands beside him. ‘Her black bouffant towered above her head and she was heavily made up with thick black mascara, midnight-blue eyeliner, red blusher and Heartbreak Pink lipstick,’ noted Chris Hutchins. ‘She was wearing a figure-hugging cream jacket with long pants and there was a jewelled tiara on her head.’1

For a few seconds, silence falls as the English and American gangs face each other. Priscilla Presley senses their nervousness: ‘You could hear a pin drop when they walked in … I was amazed at how shy they were … they were speechless, totally speechless, truly like kids, meeting their idol. Especially John – John was shy, timid, looking at him. I mean, I really believe he just couldn’t believe he was actually there with Elvis Presley.’

Priscilla finds the atmosphere ‘a little bit awkward because they kept looking at him, not really saying anything and not really sitting down, just staring at him’. She remembers Elvis saying, ‘Guys, if you’re gonna just stand around and stare at me, I may as well do my own thing.’ He sits down, and the Beatles sit cross-legged on the floor around him. ‘A chair for Mr Epstein,’ says the colonel, and people rush forward with a selection of them.

They talk about touring; George tells Elvis about their plane catching fire on their flight to Portland on Monday. Elvis says one of his aircraft engines once gave out over Atlanta. Meanwhile, the two managers huddle in a corner; Brian is keen to organise UK concert dates for Elvis, but the colonel has a rule not to mix business with pleasure. Instead, he announces to the room, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis’s private casino is now open for your pleasure. Brian, let’s play roulette.’

The two managers go through to the casino as Elvis picks up a bass guitar and starts playing along to songs on his jukebox. A television is on, with its sound turned down. Occasionally he picks up a remote control to switch channels. It is the first remote control Paul has ever seen. ‘He was switching channels and we were like, “Wow! How are you doing that?”’

Elvis calls for more guitars for the Beatles, and they join in. Paul chats to him about playing bass. The conversation is a little desultory, until John sharpens it up. ‘Why have you dropped the old rock stuff?’ he asks Elvis, adding that he’d loved his early records, but didn’t like the more recent ones. Elvis says he’ll soon be making rock records again. ‘Oh, good,’ says John. ‘We’ll buy them when you do.’ Elvis is nonplussed: he has grown accustomed to everyone telling him what he wants to hear. Later, John says he spotted a slogan saying ‘All the Way with LBJ’. John regards LBJ as a warmonger. Was this what prompted his putdown of Elvis?

They all go back to their jamming, this time ‘I Feel Fine’. Ringo has no drums, and feels under-used drumming on a table with his fingers, so he drifts off to play pool with the roadies.

John puts on a comical Clouseau voice, saying, ‘Zis is ze way it should be … ze small homely gathering wiz a few friends and a leetle muzic.’ Elvis looks baffled. After a while, the songs run dry and they all join the others in the games room. The colonel is more forthcoming than his client. John is amused by his swashbuckling stories of his early life as a carnival showman: how he wrestled with a lion, how the dancing chickens danced only when he placed them on an electric plate. ‘He’s an amazing character, a real hustling showman,’ John tells Hutchins later. ‘But Elvis – what a total anti-climax HE was. He seemed to be completely out of his head. Either he was on pills or dope … whatever it was, he was just totally uninterested and uncommunicative.’

Colonel Parker signals the end of the party by handing out presents of Elvis records to one and all. He also gives the four Beatles little covered wagons that light up when you push a button. He tells Brian Epstein he is going to buy him a cocktail cabinet. Brian says he is going to ask Harrods to send the colonel a Shetland pony, as a memento of his days in the circus.

As they are ushered out the front door, Elvis says, ‘Don’t forget to come and see us again in Memphis if you’re ever in Tennessee.’

Still adopting a comical voice, John shouts back, ‘Zanks for ze music, Elvis! Long live ze King!’ Then he asks Elvis to join the Beatles at their place in Benedict Canyon the following night.

‘Well, I’ll see. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it or not,’ replies Elvis.

On the way back, John describes the party as a total non-event: ‘I can’t decide who’s more full of shit, me or Elvis Presley.’

Once the Beatles are safely out of sight, Elvis goes back into the house and draws Larry Geller to one side. What really blew his mind, he says, is the state of their teeth. He can’t understand why, with all their money, they haven’t had them fixed.2

1 Or so Hutchins wrote in the notes he secretly maintained over several visits to the loo. Others remembered differently: Paul had Priscilla wearing ‘a purple gingham dress and a gingham bow in her very beehive hair’; Neil thought it was ‘a long dress and a tiara’; George was convinced it was ‘some sort of tight cream top with long flimsy trousers to match’; and Tony Barrow was equally sure that it was ‘a full-length lime-coloured gown’.

2 Five years later, on 30 December 1970, on an impromptu visit to the White House, Elvis tells President Nixon that ‘The Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit … The Beatles came to this country, made their money, and then returned to England where they promoted an anti-American theme.’ Present at the meeting, the White House counsel Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh noted that, while the president nodded in agreement, he also ‘expressed some surprise’. Early the following year, Elvis expresses similar misgivings on a tour of the FBI building in Washington: ‘Presley indicated that he is of the opinion that the Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music,’ reads an official memo.